[donatj]

The number of features sales has told us some big sale hinged on, that subsequently no one has used, is very high.

We actually restructured our entire product to win the sale of a very large customer who’s users didn’t fit perfectly into our metaphor. It was unwieldy and we basically rolled the whole thing back several years later.

[breakfastduck]

I could give almost limitless examples where we've been forced to drop everything and jump on implementing a hacky version of a new feature because sales convinced the CTO we were going to lose a major client if we didn't implement it asap.

They were usually never used, or used by an incredibly small percentage of users.

The platform ended up a complete mess because of the number of hacky features implemented and was a nightmare to maintain.

I'm sure we ended up losing more business due to the instability of the platform than we gained from adding these.

It's incredibly frustrating for the engineering teams who continually warned of the risks of rushing these things in without any analysis of usage.

[syshum]

>>or used by an incredibly small percentage of users.

Sometimes it is not the number of users that need the feature but just 1 or 2 very important users... The ones that have the final say over Yes we use this, or no we do not

[breakfastduck]

Yeah that can certainly be true - unfortunately we often found that the very important users to us didn’t see us as important as we saw them, meaning we’d implement these hacky features on their request on short timescales only for them to then refuse to integrate for weeks - we could have done the feature properly had we not been pressured into getting it over the line so soon.

[syshum]

Ahh yes the old "Hurry up and wait"... been there too many times....

[Spooky23]

How many people would be using it if you didn’t close the sale?

Video conferencing vendors would talk about this a lot until Zoom ate their lunch, then suddenly their principles about not adding features go away.

[syrocode]

The interesting question is whether it was a mistake. Just because it was eventually rolled back, doesn't mean it wasn't worth it to win the large customer.

[arethuza]

I once worked with a CEO who would always answer "Yes" to questions about whether the product did something, much to my horror as Director of Engineering.

Mind you his approach actually seemed to work - people would ask things in sales meetings then you'd never hear of that request again. It only went wrong in one sales meeting where one person realised what his approach was and started asking for sillier and sillier things....

[otoburb]

>>We actually restructured our entire product to win the sale of a very large customer who’s users didn’t fit perfectly into our metaphor. It was unwieldy and we basically rolled the whole thing back several years later.

Did you close the booking because of that feature? That type of decision is sometimes dependent on the financial situation of the company.

[jariel]

"some big sale hinged on, that subsequently no one has used"

Yes, but who cares if they used the feature or not (!?!) the question was, did the buyer think it was 'essential' for the deal to go through.

I mean, cynically of course, but it matters.

[damandloi]

I have seen product roadmap shifting in favor of sales requests and significantly changing the strategy. But hey, that's pivoting right?